Jürgen Habermas is a German philosopher and social theorist in the tradition of critical theory and pragmatism. His work addresses communicative rationality and the public sphere.
The Frankfurt School is a school of sociology and critical philosophy associated with the Institute for Social Research, founded at Goethe University Frankfurt in 1923. Active in the Weimar Republic during the European interwar period, the Frankfurt School initially comprised intellectuals, academics, and political dissidents dissatisfied with the contemporary socio-economic systems of the 1930s. The Frankfurt theorists proposed that social theory was inadequate for explaining the turbulent political factionalism and reactionary politics occurring in 20th-century liberal capitalist societies, such as Nazism. Critical of both capitalism and of Marxism–Leninism as philosophically inflexible systems of social organization, the School's critical theory research indicated alternative paths to realizing the social development of a society and a nation.
The public sphere is an area in social life where individuals can come together to freely discuss and identify societal problems, and through that discussion influence political action. A "Public" is "of or concerning the people as a whole." Such a discussion is called public debate and is defined as the expression of views on matters that are of concern to the public—often, but not always, with opposing or diverging views being expressed by participants in the discussion. Public debate takes place mostly through the mass media, but also at meetings or through social media, academic publications and government policy documents.
Alexander Kluge is a German author, philosopher, academic and film director.
Alternative media are media sources that differ from established or dominant types of media in terms of their content, production, or distribution. Sometimes the term independent media is used as a synonym, indicating independence from large media corporations, but generally independent media is used to describe a different meaning around freedom of the press and independence from government control. Alternative media does not refer to a specific format and may be inclusive of print, audio, film/video, online/digital and street art, among others. Some examples include the counter-culture zines of the 1960s, ethnic and indigenous media such as the First People's television network in Canada, and more recently online open publishing journalism sites such as Indymedia.
The West German student movement, sometimes called the 1968 movement in West Germany, was a social movement that consisted of mass student protests in West Germany in 1968. Participants in the movement later came to be known as 68ers. The movement was characterized by the protesting students' rejection of traditionalism and of German political authority which included many former Nazi officials. Student unrest had started in 1967 when student Benno Ohnesorg was shot by a policeman during a protest against the visit of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran. The movement is considered to have formally started after the attempted assassination of student activist leader Rudi Dutschke, which sparked various protests across West Germany and gave rise to the public opposition. The movement would create lasting changes in German culture.
Oskar Reinhard Negt is a philosopher and critical social theorist. He is an emeritus professor of sociology at Leibniz University Hannover, and one of Germany's most prominent social scientists. Little of his work has been translated into English.
Karl Heinrich Otto Rühle was a German Marxist active in opposition to both the First and Second World Wars as well as a council communist theorist.
Lifeworld may be conceived as a universe of what is self-evident or given, a world that subjects may experience together. The concept was popularized by Edmund Husserl, who emphasized its role as the ground of all knowledge in lived experience. It has its origin in biology and cultural Protestantism.
Wolfgang Walter Arnulf Abendroth was a German socialist, jurist, and political scientist. He was born in Elberfeld, now a part of Wuppertal in North Rhine-Westphalia. Abendroth was a radical social democrat and an important contributor to the constitutional foundation of post-World War II West Germany. In 1943 he was forcibly drafted into one of the 999th Division's "probation units" and while stationed in Greece he deserted to the Greek People's Liberation Army (ELAS). After the war he briefly held a Law professorship in East Germany. However, in 1948 he left for West Germany with his family, refusing to disassociate himself from the Social Democratic Party and join the, overwhelmingly stalinist, Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) which in 1949 became the ruling party of East Germany. In 1950 he was appointed professor of Political Science at Marburg and also served as a senior judge in the state court of Hesse. In 1961 he was expelled from the Social Demoractic Party for refusing to disassociate himself from the Socialist German Student Union (SDS). Due to his socialist principles and politics Abendroth was for many years after the end of the war under surveillance by West Germany's Intelligence services. First, by the CIA-affiliated, anti-communist, Gehlen Organisation and later, after 1956, by the German Federal Intelligence Service (BND) both of which were led by Reinhard Gehlen, a prominent Nazi before and during World War II.
A Berlin Republic is a 1997 book composed of a collection of transcripts of interviews with the German philosopher and social critic Jürgen Habermas conducted by various European media in the mid-1990s. The common thread of the interviews is Habermas's disagreement with resurgent German nationalism after the reunification with the former German Democratic Republic (GDR).
In political theory, refeudalization is the process of recovering the political mechanisms and relationships that used to define feudalism. Because the term "feudalism" is slightly ambiguous, "refeudalization" is ambiguous, too.
The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society is a 1962 book by the philosopher Jürgen Habermas. It was translated into English in 1989 by Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence. An important contribution to modern understanding of democracy, it is notable for "transforming media studies into a hard-headed discipline."
Lutz Wingert is a German philosopher who is sometimes identified as one of the "Third Generation" of the Frankfurt School of philosophy. He is a professor of philosophy focusing on practical philosophy at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich and a member of the Zentrum Geschichte des Wissens. He is a former student of, and a co-author with, Jürgen Habermas, a founding member of the Frankfurt School. Wingert is a former chair of practical philosophy at the University of Dortmund. Along with Wilfried Hinsch, he edits the Ideen & Argumente series.
Friedrich Adolph Wilhelm Diesterweg was a German educator, thinker, and progressive liberal politician, who campaigned for the secularization of schools. He is said to be precursory to the reform of pedagogy. Diesterweg is considered as "a teacher of teachers".
Berlin School is a term used for a new movement in German films that has emerged in the early 21st century. The German term Berliner Schule has been applied to a number of intimate German films that received critical acknowledgement, first in France.
Public sphere pedagogy (PSP) represents an approach to educational engagement that connects classroom activities with real world civic engagement. The focus of PSP programs is to connect class assignments, content, and readings with contemporary public issues. Students are then asked to participate with members of the community in various forms of public sphere discourse and democratic participation, such as town hall meetings and public debate events. Through these events, students are challenged to practice civic engagement and civil discourse.
The Spartacus League was a Marxist revolutionary movement organized in Germany during World War I. It was founded in August 1914 as the International Group by Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht, Clara Zetkin, and other members of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) who were dissatisfied with the party's official policies in support of the war. In 1916 it renamed itself the Spartacus Group and in 1917 joined the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD), which had split off from the SPD as its left wing faction. During the November Revolution of 1918 that broke out across Germany at the end of the war, the Spartacus Group re-established itself as a nationwide, non-party organization called the "Spartacus League" with the goal of instituting a soviet republic that would include all of Germany. It became part of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) when it was formed on 1 January 1919 and at that point ceased to exist as a separate entity.
Peter Uwe Hohendahl is a literary and intellectual historian and theorist. He served as the Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of German Studies at Cornell University, where he is now a professor emeritus.
The European public sphere refers to the public sphere where ideas and information are exchanged by citizens of European societies that can influence the European political life. It is to have an "arena for EU-wide public discourse".
